I'm John Batser with Professor Andrew Bayliss of the University of Birmingham,

helping me understand how the

Spartans maintain their reputation as great soldiers. Thousands of years later, despite the

facts of the matter of how they fell into and then fell out of being a headgamon.

We're now going to go to the sources of the heroic Spartans, and that is in particular

three men who were born at the beginning of the 5th century BC, the middle of it, and the end of

it, and they tell a continuous story that is the root of many of these adventures.

But the Romans inherited the Greek historians and added their own interpretation of these events.

We're going to meet them in order, I think, of when they were born.

First, there was Herodotus, who was born towards the beginning of the 5th century

BC. He's born in Anatolia. Herodotus is either the father of history or the father of journalism.

I get him confused, Andrew. They go back and forth. He's not from Greece. What brought him to

write of the Greek story from the point of view of the Persian-Greek war?

Well, he's from Halicarnassus, which is a Greek city on the edge of the Greek sphere of influence and the Persian sphere of influence.

So he would have grown up as a subject of the Persians because the Persians

had conquered the Greek cities of Asia Minor. And he's also the story about Herodicisties,

half Greek and half Karian, which means he's half Greek and half not Greek. So he sort of seems

to understand both perspectives in some ways. And his whole point

in writing his story was he said he wanted to make sure that great events didn't get forgotten.

And the great event that he saw it was the massive confrontation between the Greeks and the

Persians. Who invited him to write this down?

Did he have a bookseller?

...